With the United States and China, who will rule whom? That's the central question of In the Jaws of the Dragon by Tokyo-based journalist and writer Eamonn Fingleton. His own answer is sobering. As American leaders fixate on the Middle East, China quietly consolidates both its geostrategic vision and its economic and military power. What is at stake is far more important than manufacturing jobs or the transparency of Sovereign Wealth Funds. It is a matter of which nation will control the global system America built, and the nations integrated into that system.

Fingleton has lived and worked in Asia since the mid 1980s, and he has covered international economics and business since the 1970s. The American ruling elite, he says, does not understand China, nor the nature of the Chinese government. Most members of the elite continue to believe - a la Tom Friedman - that liberal trade will liberalize China. But Fingleton writes that what is taking place is the exact opposite. "Globalization" has merely given Beijing the financial and institutional tools to get what it wants from America, when it wants.

Over the years, Fingleton has repeatedly proven a prescient observer of international economic trends. In the late 1980s he predicted the crash of the Japanese banking system and stock market. In the late 1990s he predicted the crash of the high-technology boom, and the subsequent shift of real power back to those who control production and supply. His articles have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Harvard Business Review, among others. In the Jaws of the Dragon is Fingleton's fourth major book on trans-Pacific industrial and trading relationships- New America Foundation

Eamonn Fingleton

Eamonn Fingleton is a Tokyo-based author and economic commentator whose latest book is Unsustainable: How Economic Dogma Is Destroying American Prosperity (Nation Books, 2003).
He is also the author of In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity. Published by Houghton Mifflin in 1999, this presented an early - and damning - critique of the New Economy and a strong warning about the decline of America's once world-beating advanced manufacturing industries.
His earlier book, Blindside: Why Japan Is Still on Track to Overtake the U.S. by the Year 2000, was named one of the Ten Best Business Books of 1995 by Business Week. Excerpted in both Foreign Affairs and Fortune, Blindside was published in French and Japanese as well as in several English-language editions.
A former editor for the Financial Times and Forbes, Fingleton worked successively nine years in London and five in New York before moving to Tokyo in 1985. He is thus one of the few English-language journalists who can claim an in-depth knowledge of all three of the world's major financial capitals. He has reported from most of East Asias major economies and, as a member of a top-level American financial delegation to Beijing, met China's supreme leader Deng Xiaoping in the mid 1980s. His commentaries on Japanese economics and business have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, Challenge, The Washington Post, Time, GQ, Technology Review and The New Republic. He has been a contributor to or interviewee on many broadcast media, including CNBC, CNN, National Public Radio, the BBC, RTE, and Sky News. In September 1999, he was the featured interviewee on NPR's Talk of the Nation program. His books have been commended by, among others, James Fallows, Pat Choate, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ralph Nader, Senator Ernest Hollings, Roger Milliken, President Bill Clinton, Chalmers Johnson, and Robert Heller.
He is currently working on a new book entitled The Sun, the Dragon, and the Sleeping Cowboy: Japan's Secret Understanding with China and the Coming Collapse of American Power.
His writing on accounting matters at Forbes won him the American accounting profession's 1983 award for excellence in financial writing. In June 2001, he received the American Values Award of the U.S. Business & Industry Council for his work on Blindside and In Praise of Hard Industries.

Eamonn Fingleton explains that, despite the example of the Falun Gong movement which grew rapidly in opposition to the Party, China's government maintains tight control of the political space and does not grant citizens the right of free association.